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LONG BLOG

Funny story about the And Yet It Moves demo; I downloaded it last Thursday, so I could play it while at the hotel during my high school annual choir trip. I didn’t play it before Sunday, when a friend of mine sent me a text message, asking if he could play And Yet It Moves when I got back home. I asked him how the hell he knew that I had downloaded it, and we both looked to the stars for an answer, as he was baffled as well.

Although, I know that, in his mind, he thought he was some sort of physic badass, fucking jerk.

Now, let’s begin with the impressions.

AYIM is a simple puzzle platformer if you just looked at it, but then you get to messing with that all mighty thing called reality…err, the camera, and you get what And Yet It Moves is really about. Premise is straightforward; get to point B from point A, with some checkpoints to help you get from point A to point B.

Like they say, getting there is the hard part.

The game uses the plane you’re on (and there’s only one plane so far, so don’t worry) as your way of dealing with obstacles. Rotate the plane 90 degrees to fall through a small-spot, which is now a hole for you to get to your destination. Rotate again to walk up a wall that was previously too large for you to jump over. Rotate to stop a giant bolder from crushing you to death, rotate to reach a new platform you couldn’t by just jumping (your momentum stays the same throughout rotation of the plane), rotate to save yourself from a deathly fall, or to fall forever…Ok, maybe not fall forever, but you get the idea. Rotate to clear shit, in 90 or 180 degree increments, using the arrow keys on your keyboard.

After playing some of the demo, the “rotation” gameplay works quite nicely; this makes for a delightfully challenging game. It’s not so hard that no one but the hardcore crowd can play, but it’s difficult enough to ensure that once you clear a obstacle that has been teasing you for the last 5-8 minutes, whether it was by luck or by skill, you feel a little glee in your stomach. It’s also difficult enough that you’ll keep trying to clear that obstacle until a spot on your favorite TF2 server opens up, or you realize what time it is and stop…only to pick it up again later.

This is all helped by the weird yet freakishly awesome art style. Your character is sort of drawn on a sheet of construction paper, with a worn-out pencil, and then crudely cut out along the edges. The environment has these static-but-moving backgrounds that look like nature magazine tear-outs that give everything that “Hell, I did this for a project in Art class” feeling, and by the looks of it, you probably did, which, at least, in my opinion, is great.

Overall, I can honestly say that if I come across the 15 bucks, I’ll pick this up for pick up and play time, I played the demo in short bursts, and that seems to work best for this game. Clear a level, leave it, come back, enjoy. It also has that Speed Run mode for those who like to challenge themselves, as well as leaderboards and shareable ghost runs of levels you completed that you’re proud of, which is really nice. And it's all not so intensive that it’ll break your PC, which is a nice little present to boot. I’d say check this title out, you might find that you’ll like And Yet It Moves…and find out what the hell that name could possibly mean.